Taboo Truths by Jason Zenith

Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
Check out my other blog at taboo-truths.blogspot.com

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

We're in an era of total supremacy of the secret police state when they are caught infiltrating a presidential campaign of one of two political cartel parties (of course they do it to the Greens, Socialists, Communists, etc.) and the president's demand for an investigation is met with howls of outrage from politicians (Democrats) and the corporate media chorus.

You'd think the FBI would have to run for cover. Instead we're being hysterically ranted at that Trump is "threatening national security" (!) and "endangering lives" (!!) by ordering the Department of "Justice" to investigate, and wanting to know who the spy was. (Turns out he was some shitheel retired professor.)

Sure, Trump is loathsome, but this is yet another example of how the Democratic Party and corporate media have put the secret police agencies on a pedestal and demand that we worship them. It's disgusting.

These are the same agencies that daily commit perjury, burglaries, stealing personal property, issuing 50,000 bogus "national security" letters a year demanding personal bank, medical, and every kind of record under the pretense of "investigating terrorism," and oftentimes assassinations.

Thursday, May 10, 2018

Kvelling is Yiddish. It means "to be extraordinarily pleased; especially, to be bursting with pride." Certainly the Israelis and Saudis have reason to be. Both nations are eager for the U.S. to go to war with Iran, and have been pushing the U.S. in that direction for years.

Trump finally carried out his threat to kill the hard-won nuclear agreement with Iran. Two years of negotiations by the U.S., France, Germany, Britain, China, and Russia, all arrayed against Iran, with U.S.-imposed sanctions choking the Iranian economy, produced the best deal that could be squeezed from the theocrats ruling that nation. Iran surrendered ALL its enriched uranium, agreed to permanently shut down a reactor capable of producing plutonium, mothballed its centrifuges, and accepted extremely stringent oversight by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). All this to last for 15 years.

If Trump wanted a better deal, he had plenty of time to negotiate one. But he has demagogically insisted for several years that the agreement was the "worst deal ever." A preposterous assertion.

The European "partners" (in reality, they're nothing more than junior lackeys to U.S. Imperialism) pleaded with and cajoled Trump to try to make him see reason, to no avail. French President Emmanuel Macron came all the way to Washington and endured demeaning treatment by Trump (Trump ostentatiously pretending to pick something off Macron's suit in front of the world press and announcing it was "dandruff," forcing Macron to submit to the insult) for absolutely nothing. Britain dispatched their foreign minister, the buffoon Boris Johnson, to Washington to pointlessly lobby various Trump regime apparatchiks on the matter.

Macron addressed the U.S. Congress, delivering a relatively honest speech which no doubt annoyed most of that body.

The Europeans are already caving in, reaffirming their status as the U.S.' bitch. This proves that the European Union is a bust. It was supposed to allow Europe to swing its proper weight. Instead it is a bad joke. The European bourgeoisie just cannot or will not free themselves from their position of slavish subordination to the U.S.

Trump has made clear that, as usual, foreign corporations must abide by U.S. "law" and conform to U.S. foreign policy. Just a day after Trump wrecked the agreement with Iran, which the U.S. got Russia, China, Germany, Britain, France, and the EU to sign on to against Iran, his Ambassador to Germany is already ordering German companies to shut down their Iranian business operations "immediately." Well, when you're the Boss of the World, you can issue such orders.

Unless companies want to quit the U.S. market, which is many times the size of the Iranian one, AND subject themselves to ruinous U.S. "fines," AND risk criminal indictments of the company and its executives, effectively confining those executives to their home countries or risk arrest and extradition to the U.S. to "face American justice" (decades in prison) for refusing to be agents of U.S. Imperialist foreign policy, these non-U.S. businesses have to knuckle under to U.S. diktat.

Some U.S. media "commentators" are fatuously saying canceling the agreement of the U.S. government was Trump "making good on a campaign pledge." As if Trump feels an obligation to keep his word on anything. And he made numerous pledges to snooker people into voting for him- all the good ones he has reneged on, only keeping the venal ones. (As I expected.)

Here are some choice excerpts that the bombastic blustering bullyboy Trump spewed in making his announcement on May 8th:

Trump- "this deal is catastrophic for America, for Israel, and for the whole Middle East."

He sneered at "the decaying and rotten structure of the current deal." (Reminds me of Adolf Hitler "freeing" Germany from the "shackles" of the rotten Versailles Treaty.)

Trump says the new deal he pretends he'll force on Iran "will benefit all of Iran and the Iranian people." (I'm sure he cares so much about the Iranian people! This is a guy who's trying to ban all Muslims from the U.S.) He wants to throw in "terrorism" and Iranian "meddling" in Syria and Yemen as part of new demands on Iran.

Trump threatens "any nation" that aids "Iran in its [non-existent] quest for a nuclear weapon" will also get slammed with U.S. sanctions.

Of course, Iran wasn't developing nuclear weapons, it was developing the capability to develop such weapons. And right now, iran isn't even doing THAT!

But the lying jackass demagogue who is president of the U.S. Empire could care less about facts, as he has shown throughout his entire adult life. Nor did the U.S. media bother informing the millions who are forced to rely on it for information that what Trump said was false. For all their bleatings about his "lies," they reinforce some of his lies.

Iran now has to decide whether to accept being completely ripped off, having surrendered its nuclear program (mainly consisting of uranium enrichment) for nothing, or restart it. Trump is making gangster threats implying violence. Many imperialists in the U.S. and Israel, and the evil, medieval rulers of Saudi Arabia, have long been urging the U.S. to bomb Iran. (Dying U.S. Senator John McCain would love to see that.)

Iran's major commodity is, of course, oil. And since oil is traded on the international market in U.S. dollars, and the U.S. Treasury Department controls dollar transactions, that makes it extremely difficult for Iran to sell its oil without U.S. permission. So the U.S. has Iran over a barrel, so to speak. (One of Saddam Hussein's fatal mistakes was floating the idea of using a medium of exchange other than the U.S. dollar for oil transactions. The U.S. tends to react violently to impingements on its power.)

The Israelis and Saudis are eager for the U.S. to wage war on Iran, especially a bombing campaign. Terrorism ("covert action") would also be part of the war. The U.S. under Obama infiltrated Special Forces teams into Iran to plant surveillance devices, including radiation monitors disguised as bricks in walls, and spy gadgets to monitor truck traffic disguised as rocks. The Israelis of course were busily assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, creating terror to discourage Iranian scientists from participating in nuclear research. And Obama infiltrated the Stuxnet malware into Iran's nuclear program computer system, destroying centrifuges.

Understand that it is official U.S. policy to overthrow the Iranian government. (This would be the second time they did that, the first being in 1953, which destroyed Iranian democracy.) The U.S. is still bitter that the client dictator it installed in 1953, the Shah, was overthrown in 1979. And while the quarter million Iranians who died under the brutal reign of the Shah are never, ever mentioned in U.S. media, they still reference the so-called "hostage crisis," when the apparatchiks in the U.S. embassy in Tehran were seized and held for 444 days, and the U.S. media engaged in a daily drumbeat of hysterical propaganda about it. ABC "News" even started an entire evening program devoted to the "crisis," which became "Nightline," hosted by Kissinger maven Ted Koppel. What's never said, what has been consigned to the memory hole, is why Iran seized the U.S. apparatchiks. Obviously a key part of the story. But not in the U.S. propaganda version of it.

Iran warned the Jimmy Carter regime not to give sanctuary to the fleeing. Shah. Then Henry Kissinger called the president of the U.S. and transmitted an order from David Rockefeller, a man at the apex of the U.S. ruling class, that Carter must allow the Shah in. Carter protested that there would be bad consequences, but obeyed his master. (Carter was chosen to be president in 1976 by the Rockefeller-created Trilateral Commission, which assigned Zbigniew Brzezinski as Carter's "national security advisor." Brzezinski went on the engineer the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, something he has boasted about. Time magazine, an organ run by Trilateral Commission members, presented Carter to the American public as the second coming of JFK.)

Well, the "hostage-taking" duly followed the Shah's entry into the U.S., the resulting media-generated "crisis" ultimately cost Carter re-election. And the racist neo-fascist Ronald Reagan, running against Carter in the 1980 election, made a sub rosa deal with the Khomeini regime to only free the U.S. personnel minutes after Carter was no longer president.

Now back to the present. What of the non-U.S. lackey nations that are a party to the nuclear agreement with Iran, China and Russia? They too operate under the oppressive umbrella of the U.S.-controlled global financial system. [1]

And the U.S. has a veritable galaxy of laws, rules, and regulations that give it infinite power over the financial transactions of others. No bank that wishes to do transactions outside its home country's boundaries can defy the U.S. People and companies that have never set foot in the U.S. or done any action inside the U.S. are routinely indicted by the U.S. and either extradited or kidnapped to "face justice" inside the U.S. and ultimately be subjected to often draconian sentences imprisoned in the vast U.S. gulag. (The U.S., with about 4.7% of the world's population, holds 25% of the entire planet's prisoners. The U.S. imprisoners a higher percentage of its adult population- close to 1%- than any nation on earth. China, a country with four times the population of the U.S., has slightly fewer prisoners.)

The U.S. considers its laws binding on everyone on earth- and indeed enforces them. The railroading of the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was set up in Thailand by U.S. DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents pretending to be arms buyers for the Colombian rebel group FARC, and who now sits in a U.S. prison, is one of many examples. (What the hell is an alleged drug agency doing setting up fake arms deals to entrap foreign citizens? Good questions.) Britain has shipped hapless citizens to the U.S. to face bogus charges, to the outrage of its own media and public.

So what does Europe do when its arms are twisted by the U.S.? It says "Uncle!" Europe is paying the economic price for U.S.-imposed sanctions on Russia to punish Russia for "meddling" in Ukraine. The U.S. has fined Europe's banks billions of dollars in a shakedown racket for violating sanctions on countries the U.S. doesn't like. (Other nation's banks have been hit too. See chart.)

But the cowardly bourgeois rulers of Europe are good at one thing: punching down. They sure know how to oppress their own people, as the corrupt Spanish government of the Francoist Mariano Rajoy is doing in Catalonia, or as the remorseless British Prime Minister Theresa May is doing, deporting tens of thousands of Commonwealth citizens who came to Britain legally decades ago and are now being reclassified as "illegal" because the British government failed to issue them documents when they arrived. Theresa May, the architect of the Grenfell Towers Fire massacre who slashed funding for fire and police protection starting in her previous job as Interior Secretary. (A job in which she began the targeting of immigrants.)

Anyway, sit back and enjoy the coming war between Iran and the U.S./Israel/Saudi Arabia. Iran is not completely alone. It is fighting side by side with Russia in Syria to prop up the murderous Assad regime. It also has the loyal support of Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and militia. (The Israelis have been busily bombing Iranian weapons shipments in Syria they claim are destined for Hezbollah.) Every time Iran counterattacks, except the propagandists and governments of the U.S. side to shriek "IRANIAN TERRORISM!"

Israel has wasted no time lighting the fuse. Today they bombed fifty Iranian targets inside Syria, using as justification an alleged Iranian missile fired into the Golan Heights (former Syrian territory that Israel conquered in the 1967 war). No mention in U.S. (and other "Western") media that this follows months of Israeli bombing raids on Iranian targets inside Syria, with no response from Iran at all until now, with the alleged missile. (Or 20 missiles, as CBS later asserted. CBS is virtually a propaganda arm of the Israeli government in the U.S.) Israel threatened more to come if the Iranians don't take it lying down. Russia has expressed alarm over the Israeli pummeling.

This war, if it comes, will go on for years. Like some other wars the U.S. started in the region, eh?

1] The U.S. isn't even satisfied with controlling the world's financial system. It even has to spy on everybody and hack into bank computers. Even SWIFT, the system for international bank transactions, was hacked by the NSA. (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication- SWIFT. SWIFT has cut off Iran's banks from the rest of the world, on U.S. orders.)

Tuesday, May 01, 2018

General
John Kelly, current
(but maybe not for long) White House chief of staff,
is reported to have called his boss, the President of the United
States of America, one Donald J(ackass) Trump, an "idiot."
Kelly denies it, calling the reports "bullshit."

Rex
"Big Oil" Tillerson, the former Secretary of State who
Trump fired via Twitter so the whole world would get the news before
Rex did, was reported to have referred to Trump as a "fucking
moron." Tillerson repeatedly refused to confirm or deny saying
it, a tacit confirmation that he had
said
it.

Which
man is right?

Let's
look at definitions. An idiot is:

1.
Informal.
an utterly foolish or senseless person:

If
you think you can get elected president, you're an idiot!

2.
Psychology. (no longer in technical use; considered offensive) a
person of the lowest order in a former and discarded classification
of mental retardation, having a mental age of less than three years
old and an intelligence quotient under 25.

Whereas
a moron is:

1.
Informal.
a person who is notably stupid or lacking in good judgment:

I
wonder why they elected that narrow-minded moron to the presidency.

2.
Psychology. (no longer in technical use; now considered offensive) a
person of borderline intelligence in a former and discarded
classification of mental retardation, having an intelligence quotient
of 50 to 69.

Under
the discredited psychological definitions, it is clearly worse to be
an idiot than to be a moron.

Trump
clearly lacks good judgment. On the other hand, he seems to have
excellent shark-like instincts. Socially, politically, and in terms
of the psychological manipulation of others, he is brilliant,
unfortunately for us.

And
while he says
utterly
foolish and senseless things, it is hard to conclude that he IS
utterly foolish and senseless.

What
he is is a pig-headed bigot, a man with a closed-mind who doesn't
like to learn and who has strong prejudices about the world. Now he
has U.S. government power to try and impose his beliefs about the
world on
the
world.

But
George Bush was the same. Just not as outré.

And
in regard to using U.S. power to bully, that's what U.S. power has
been used for since the U.S. was created in the 18th century.

Trump
is rather like the Roman Emperor Nero. Or the Russian Tsar Ivan the
Terrible. Or Vlad the Impaler. A particularly noxious ruler of a
noxious system. People who think "the problem" is Trump
ignore the fundamental reality. So accident that the Democratic
Party, its political hacks, the establishment media, and the secret
police agencies, ignore that reality. That is the system they are
part of, that they wish to perpetuate.

More
disappointing are their fellow travelers among the "alternative"
media and putative "progressives." Useful idiots, they are.
(That would be Lenin's definition of idiot.)

Monday, April 23, 2018

U.S. elites love deriding exposes of their state crimes as "conspiracy theories," and painting the exponents of such factually substantiated crimes as paranoid, delusional crackpots.

But that doesn't stop them from pushing ludicrous conspiracy theories of their own invention.

For example, historically, social unrest in the U.S. has been attributed to a nefarious, hidden "communist conspiracy," including the movement of African-Americans to be free of racial oppression. The establishment media, politicians, and secret police agencies (first and foremost the FBI and CIA) have all relied on this propaganda trope- and seem to believe it themselves in many cases.

President Lyndon Johnson was convinced that the millions of people who marched against his war on Vietnam were zombie puppets controlled by the Kremlin, and he ordered the CIA to find the "links" between Moscow and the anti-war movement. (That movement, by the way, consisted of numerous organizations with wildly varying political orientations, and millions of people of all ages, classes, personalities, etc. So Lyndon Johnson's conspiracy theory, that his multifarious opposition to his vicious, criminal, murderous attack on Vietnam was all a creation of the Soviet Union, was truly demented,)

Since the election of Trump as president over a year ago, the main U.S. secret police agencies (FBI, CIA, and to a lesser extent NSA), the Democratic Party, and most of the U.S. elite media (and much second and third tier media) has, day in and day out, assiduously peddled a conspiracy theory, that Donald Trump is a Manchurian Candidate elected and controlled by Vladimir Putin, the autocrat of Russia. Even elements of the allegedly alternative media, which is supposed to be in opposition to the establishment power structure and act as a corrective to the propaganda of the ruling structure, has drunk deeply of this hallucinogenic-spiked Kool-Aid.

And now, the Democratic National Committee has dived off the deep end into the pool of delusion.

Refusing to call for reform of the Electoral College, which prevented the person with the most votes, their party's candidate and Queen Bee Hillary Clinton from winning, instead the Democratic National Committee, headed by a horrible hack named Tom Perez, is once again acting in moral and political cowardice, absurdly scapegoating Russia for revealing the party's dirty conniving, WikiLeaks for providing a public service (information), and the winning Trump campaign. Perez and the DNC has filed a lawsuit in a U.S. Federal court in Manhattan alleging a conspiracy by Russian government officials, the Trump presidential campaign, and WikiLeaks to sabotage the Democrats' electoral prospects and elect Trump. [1]

Revealing the emails that uncovered the DNC's treachery in the primaries to ensure the defeat of Senator Bernie Sanders and the victory of Queen Hillary, and the secret speech she made to an audience of high financiers in which she explained what she really stood for, and don't pay attention to all that guff she feeds the public, is hardly "previously unimaginable treachery."

Here's real treachery from past U.S. elections.

Nixon 1968. Conspired with the generals ruling "South" Vietnam to sabotage the Paris Peace talks being conducted by the Johnson regime, to help Nixon get elected president. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek was used as a go-between. Johnson knew what was happening from telephone taps.

Reagan 1980. A deal was cut with Iran to not release the American imperialist hostages being held in the U.S. embassy/spy nest in Tehran in order to ensure Carter's defeat. Later U.S. arms were surreptitiously shipped to Iran, a country then publicly reviled by the U.S. government and media.

But I digress.

Since the proximate causes of Clinton's defeat was the archaic Electoral College, and then-FBI director James Comey's reigniting of the scandal of Clinton hiding her emails as Secretary of State on a private server, which he did only 10 days before the November 7 election, causing Clinton's advantage in the polls to plunge precipitously from a lead of 14% to just 3.5% (within the margin of error) or even in some polls, it is perverse for the Democratic Party to pick the scapegoats they have chosen.

Given that this is the second election in two decades in which their candidate got more votes and "lost" because of the Electoral College (Al Gore and the party allowed the GOP to steal the 2000 Election in Florida, engineered by Florida Governor Jeb Bush, brother of "winner" George Bush), you'd think the Democrats would notice a problem with the fairness of the system. Instead we are subjected to propaganda screeching that "Russia is trying to undermine confidence in our elections!" and "Russia is attacking Our Democracy!" ("Our Democracy" is code for Our System of Rule, the corporate oligarchy, the bourgeois class dictatorship, the power establishment that cannot be voted away.)

But the Democrats don't want to challenge the Electoral College. They also don't want to make a PEEP about the Republicans' success in disenfranchising traditional Democratic voters. They refused to challenge the stolen elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all of which Trump "won" by small margins thanks to voting machine chicanery engineered by Republican officials in control of the voting process.

1] Actually there are even more defendants in the 66-page complaint - Roger Stone, former campaign worker George Papadopoulos, former campaign associate Rick Gates, "John Does 1-10," and more are named as part of what was apparently a vast conspiracy against the poor innocent Democrats.

The suit claims the defendants are guilty of violating numerous laws- everything from conspiracy to violations of federal copyright laws and the Trade Secrets Act. And of COURSE the Democrats are suing for millions of dollars in "damages." Hey, it wouldn't be the Democratic Party if they weren't angling for money!

Saturday, April 21, 2018

We're being told by the U.S. corporate propaganda system that we all
loved Barbara Bush, who was some sort of kind-hearted yet iron-willed
lady who loved children. It's garbage, of course. She was partners with a
major criminal of the 20th century, her husband, George Herbert Walker
Bush.

Just turning on the radio, I was subjected to career
propagandist Susan Page pushing the mythology that Bush was "America's
Grandmother" who "loved children." Those are two of the ubiquitous
propaganda lines the huge U.S. corporate propaganda system is
assiduously shoveling down our throats. (Apparently Queen Mother Bush
didn't care for Guatemalan, Salvadorean, Honduran, Panamanian, or
Palestinian children, among others.) She's getting the full media
sendoff, as the U.S. corporate propaganda system once again acts EXACTLY
like state media.

Naturally, the BBC, always reliably
sycophantic to U.S. imperialism, is parroting the U.S. propaganda lines
about the U.S.' Queen Mother. (Who knew this was really an aristocracy?)

Marx thought that the bourgeoisie had overthrown the aristocracy. If they did, it was only to become a new aristocracy.

Google, partner in mass surveillance with the NSA, does its bit to make us bow our heads in memory of the old battle-axe.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

She was 92, with an iron will, and up to her eyeballs in Bush clan criminality. Her husband is a known sex offender who gropes women. But that's the least of his crimes.

The Bushes are part of the contemporary U.S. aristocracy, permanent fixtures of a ruling political elite. This is treated as a natural state of affairs in a nation whose propagandists and politicians can't stop for one second yammering about "Our Democracy," as if such a thing exists. It exists if you apply an Orwellian definition to "democracy," meaning oligarchy.

U.S. and even foreign media is acting as if a Queen has died. They are trying to create the impression that she was a popular figure. I rather doubt most Americans ever gave much thought to Barbara Bush. She operated behind the scenes.

Here's some sample rhetoric from the CBS propaganda network: She was "as real as it gets," she was "compassionate," and charitable, she cared about "literacy." No wonder that, according to CBS, "tributes are pouring in" for Mamma Bear Bush. (Actually her kind are dedicated to political and historical illiteracy for the people.)

I didn't see her alleged "compassion" on display when her husband was slaughtering 4,000 poor Panamanians. Or when her son caused the deaths of a million Iraqis. Or when her husband, as Reagan's vice-president, had blood up to his elbows helping to surreptitiously fund the terrorists commiting atrocities in Nicaragua from their CIA bases in Honduras and Costa Rica, or supporting the fascist death squad regime of El Salvador. Numerous other examples could be cited.

The Bush clan supported the Third Reich financially. That's some history that the U.S. establishment has consigned to oblivion. (This is copiously documented in books and videos.)

And then there is the 9/11 conspiracy which the Bush crime family and their Saudi friends wrapped around the Al-Qaeda conspiracy, to allow planes to be flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, a cover for the demolition of those towers, along with a third building, 7 World Trade Center (another real world event consigned to the bourgeoisie's memory hole) by nanothermite explosives, also proven beyond doubt by physical evidence. (Just go to youtube.com and search "Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth" and educate yourself. Or go to their website, https://www.ae911truth.org/)

Would the U.S. media be any more uniform if it was all government controlled? It couldn't be more unanimous in its fawning eulogizing for the nasty Bush matriarch. Put another way, at such times, which come all too often, there is no functional difference between the corporate media and the state media of North Korea, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia. (The beating of the war drums to agitate the populace to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the war on Vietnam in 1964 with the fictitious attack on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, or the war drive in 1917, are particularly pernicious examples of this phenomenon of the privately-owned media acting exactly like government organs.)

Also, in their typical slavish fashion, those reliable sycophants to U.S. imperialism at the BBC also gushed a bunch of guff about the American Queen Mother. Imperialist shills at the BBC intoned: "We'll remember Barbara Bush, wife and mother to two U.S. presidents," "who won the hearts of Americans with her self-deprecating wit, determination, and" blah blah blah. Self-deprecating wit? Won the hearts of Americans? What bosh, as they'd say in Britain, if they were honest.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

"Maybe" was his favorite answer to hard questions. Like, Should Facebook be regulated.

As
to why Facebook didn't tell their users about their personal data being
surreptitiously used by Cambridge Analytica to help Trump for TWO
YEARS, he said, disingenuously, that looking back it was a mistake not
to. Translation: If he had known it would eventually explode into a
PUBLIC SCANDAL, he wouldn't have hidden it from people all this time.

Tech nerds need to invent a crystal ball to see into the future. Just doing what is ethically right is impossible for them.

People
have pointed out that for 14 years, Zuckerberg has run the same shtick
of "apologizing" and promising to do better on those occasions when he's
caught out doing something scummy. He's basically a calculating hustler
weasel. His "apologies" are as sincere as all the establishment blather
about "democracy" and "rights." It's just gaslighting, brainwashing
people.

Friday, April 06, 2018

How's this for irony? A known sex assaulter is making it harder for people to access birth control. His regime has issued rules allowing even more religious zealots to refuse to pay for health insurance that covers contraception. (Apparently his regime's deregulation mania is selective.) This is piled on top of the GOP-controlled Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case to allow companies owned by religious fanatics to deny contraception coverage to their employees in company medical insurance plans. Trump has gone even farther, causing regulations to be issued allowing company bosses with "moral" objections to birth control to exclude contraception reimbursements from company health plans.

A recent Pew poll of citizens of non-U.S.nations finds a precipitous decline in the "favorable" view of the U.S. under president Donald "Huge Narcissist" Trump. Only about a quarter of people polled outside the U.S. have a "favorable" opinion of the U.S. under Trump.

This is good news. Under Obama, millions, maybe billions, of credulous idiots around the world were taken in by the clever, dangerous con man Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama and had a "favorable" view of the violently imperialist, destructive U.S. The Trump results contrast with an unbelievable 60% who thought well of the U.S. during the Obama regime. Europeans in particular are stubborn fans of the criminal Obama, a sneaky, evil man who greatly strengthened the secret police state here, among numerous other crimes against humanity. He was also a brutal repressor of dissent, which is of a piece with perfecting a secret police state.

Of course, since the U.S. is mostly (but not entirely) a force for evil in the world, it is more realistic to have an "unfavorable" view of the U.S. Unfortunately international public opinion is totally subjective and swings like a weathervane according to the subjective impression of the likeability of whoever happens to be the Chief Imperialist of the U.S. at the moment.

Going against the trend, Russians had a more favorable opinion of the U.S. under Trump. This has yet to be justified by real changes in U.S. policy towards Russia. Trump has not eased sanctions against Russia, imposed to punish Russia for daring to resist the U.S.-bloc's political annexation of Ukraine. In Syria there is real conflict between the U.S. and Russia, with Russia supporting the murderous Assad regime with combat aircraft, and the U.S. fighting ISIS and other Islamist groups (while assiduous avoiding fighting the Assad regime). The U.S. just shot down an Assad regime warplane that was attacking or threatening U.S.-allied forces and their U.S. helpers on the ground. Russia responded by announcing that henceforth U.S. planes over Syria would be "targets." (An ambiguous term which implies they might be fired upon.) And Russia has ended communications with the U.S. military over Syria, which had been used to avoid aerial conflict by the two nations' warplanes over Syria as they bomb their chosen targets- the Russians to help Assad, the U.S. targeting ISIS etc. However, Trump conspicuously did not carry on the hostile anti-Russian tone of the Obama regime. Trump's reluctance to get with the anti-Russian program of U.S. elites is the main reason he is under relentless attack by an unholy alliance of the Democratic, Party, the corporate media, and the main secret police agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA).

The BBC also just announced the results of their own poll of 36,000 people in various countries. Only a third thought the U.S. was a force for good. (Amazing that a third of the world's people STILL don't get it!) Canada came out on tops as a Good Guy nation. Britain ranked down with the U.S. That should be no surprise, since the British ruling class has tied their nation tightly to the U.S. ever since World War II, like Odysseus bound to the mast of his ship to enjoy the sweet singing of the Sirens without hurling himself to his own doomed, lured by their irresistible voices. The British similarly were lured by the self-deception that the U.S. would serve their imperialist interests, and not vice versa as it turned out. Their innate snobbery caused them to underestimate the savvy of the American imperialists.

Now Israel, on the other hand, has the U.S. wrapped around its little finger! And that's almost entirely down to the power of organized Jews in the U.S. The Anglophile WASP elite of the U.S. didn't deliver for "Great" Britain what some Jews in the U.S. have done!

An oddity of history: a small nation dominating a much larger, much more powerful one. May be unique in the annals of nations.

After several years of monitoring the British government's global propaganda arm, the BBC (British Broadcasting Government), what leaps out at me are the following objects of hate at the BBC:

-The Venezuelan government, headed by Nicolas Maduro

-The Colombian rebel movement FARC

-The defunct secret police agency the STASI of the defunct nation East Germany (they just bashed this one again September 14)

-The defunct Soviet Union

-Russia

-Vladimir Putin

Now by "bashing" I mean gratuitous stories that are slanted and grossly unbalanced.

For example, in attacking the Venezuelan govenment, they never give the government's viewpoint, nor that of the millions of Venezuelans who support it. You ONLY hear those Venezuelans attacking the regime, and the foreign governments trying to overthrow it (namely the U.S.). Even worse, while constantly portraying the Maduro government as violently repressive, they have completely hidden the facts that the so-called "protesters" are in fact violent thugs who set fires, attack motor vehicles, burn cliinics, murder policemen, and have burned alive dark-skinned poor people who the "protesters" presume are Chavistas, based on their pigmentation and economic class. But that's not bad enough for the smarmy and dishonest propagandists at the BBC. They cynically add in the people, including police, murdered by the thugs the BBC portrays as brave oppressed people fighting for democracy, with the street goons who get themselves killed while committing felonies in the streets, in one total, which they mislead listeners and viewers into believing are all victims of government violence. They talk about "protesters," then give a number of people killed to date, sneakily aggregating deaths on both sides without telling you.

NPR, a U.S.-government domestic propaganda network, is the same as the BBC in regards to how it "covers" Venezuela.

You don't have to be a supporter of the Maduro regime- I'm not- to see that this vulgar propaganda is merely a political operation to prepare public opinion in the U.S., UK, and wherever in the world people are stuck relying on the BBC for their "news," for the overthrow of the "evil" and "repressive" Venezuelan government, in the name of "restoring democracy."

Yeah, the U.S. and UK are so in love with democracy that both are shoveling armaments in the Saudi Arabian regime''s hungry maw as fast as they can. Saudi Arabia, one of the two most repressive countries on earth (North Korea is the other) is using those weapons to destroy Yemen. They are butchering its people, starving them with a naval blockade, and causing an uncontrolled cholera epidemic which has sickened over 600,000 Yemenis and killed several thousand already. All to try to put in power a so-called "president" who has so little indigenous support that like the South Vietnamese generals who ruled that ersatz country, are totally reliant on foreign military power to try and subjugate the populace. (One group, the Houthis, were able to put the fake Yemeni government to flight in Saudi Arabia.)

Western guff about "human rights" and "democracy," SOO cynically dishonest, has done much to discredit those essential concepts. Just as the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and going down the scale of degeneration, the likes of Pol Pot in Cambodia (or "Kampuchia" as it was styled when his psychopaths, the Khmer Rouge, ruled it) and Robert Mugabe in Ziimbabwe and others, have discredited and destroyed the very words "communism" and "socialism" with their cynical misappropriation of those terms for their own base power manias, so are human rights and democracy being delegitimized by the scumbag imperialists of "the West."

The BBC (and the entirety of Western power-establishment media) has been so grossly twisted on the question of Ukraine, and Crimea, that it merits a separate essay. Just coincidentally, an example of deranged BBC distortion of reality occurs as I write this. According to the BBC, Russia is now holding military exercises "close to NATO's frontier." In other phrasing, they "report" breathlessly "Russian military operations near NATO's border- is it cause for alarm." That is to say, inside Russia on Russia's own border. It just so happens that NATO has pushed itself RIGHT UP TO THE RUSSIAN BORDER. So now if Russia stations its OWN MILITARY INSIDE ITS OWN BORDERS, that is deemed to be a "Threat" to NATO! Amazing.

I don't like Russia, and Putin is a sinister autocrat. But I don't throw objectivity and reason out the window because of it.

Barely a peep out of U.S. establishment media about it. Which provides a stark and very politically revealing contrast with how they went on and on about the "so-called election" of Putin, just concluded. Putin ran against 7 opponents, and received 76% of the vote. Sisi imprisoned and intimidated all of his opponents, and ran against a ringer who said he was supporting Sisi!

It's true that there were reports of ballot box stuffing in Russia. And the West's choice for Russian president, Viktor Navalny, was barred from voting. However there is no reason to doubt that Putin would have won in a fair election against Navalny, if by a less impressive margin.

Western media gave Putin another demerit for the "low" turnout of 64% in Russia. (It was only 40% in Egypt- of course that was lightly skated over.) I suppose the media hacks forgot that turnout in U.S. presidential elections is only 54-55%!

The elephant in the room here is how U.S. media barely mentioned the Egyptian pseudo-election, and the ongoing, horrible repression in Egypt. It is another example of the blatant, hypocritical, double standards Western media apply. The lack of objectivity is what distinguishes journalism from propaganda.

Wednesday, April 04, 2018

It shows contempt for King that his murderers are being protected, 50
years after they assassinated him. They are being protected by everyone
who refuses to name them!

That, unfortunately and shamefully, includes allegedly "alternative," "progressive" media such as Mother Jones, Democracy Now!, and others. (The Nation,
another CIA accomplice, doesn't fall into that category as it is
Establishment media, the leftward-most edge of the U.S. propaganda
system which has always conformed to official lies about U.S.
assassinations.)

The murderers are well known, and ample evidence established their guilt long ago.

They
are the CIA, the Memphis Police, and the FBI, whose main role, as in
all major U.S. domestic political assassinations, was to do a sham
"investigation" framing up the designated fall guy, who is always the
same guy, the Lone Assassin.

The U.S.-government radio
propaganda network, NPR (National Public Radio), asserted once again on
its "news" show this morning that King was assassinated by James Earl
Ray, the designated fall guy. This is easily disproved. Not just by the
fact that Ray was no marksman, but by such facts that the CIA procured
false identity papers for Ray in the names of four Canadian men who
physically resembled him. The CIA's resident agent in Canada admitted
after his retirement that he had obtained these documents prior to the
assassination on orders from his superiors. (As I recall, this was
reported in Rolling Stone magazine. Down the memory hole now!)

Amy Goodman, the head of the Democracy Now!
TV/radio program, speaks in incomplete sentences every time she
mentions King's murder. She repeatedly mentions he was assassinated, but
never says "by the CIA." She doesn't say who murdered him. She
is being coy. She doesn't intone the Official Lie that James Earl Ray,
the designated fall guy, did it. That would indicate she knows that
isn't true. But she just leaves a blank. History is not blank here!

Of
course, the corporate media is even worse. Goodman and others at least
perform the service of retelling King's opposition to the Vietnam War
(which arguably is what got him killed) and his solidarity with
oppressed workers, specifically the striking, horribly abused black
sanitation workers of Memphis, Tennessee, where the hit was performed.

How about respecting King enough to stop protecting his murderers? And drop the phony cant about "honoring" him!

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

With Mueller's subpoenaing of the business records of Trump's business enterprises, it becomes obvious that the plot to bring down Trump doesn't hinge on "Russian collusion." Rather, as with the criminal charges brought against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, Mueller combs through the past history of Trump to find any indictable offense.The crimes alleged against Manafort and Gates have nothing to do with the Trump campaign at all. Other idiots have stupidly lied to the FBI and become pawns to Mueller as a result, at his mercy. Even a lawyer did this! (Don't people know by now NEVER to talk to the FBI?)

The Hate Trump bloc of politicians and media keep asserting that Trump must have colluded with Russia, because he acts like he has something to hide. But they are so stupid they can't see that Trump indeed has a huge number of things to hide- based on his lifetime of getting away with breaking the rules. It has nothing to do with Russian "meddling in our election" and "hacking our democracy," blah blah blah.

The same thing happened with Kenneth Starr's attacks on Bill Clinton. Starr was supposedly investigating Whitewater real estate deals from years ago in Arkansas. Ultimately he used the Paula Jones sex harassment civil suit as an entry point to accusing Clinton of impeachable offenses derived from Clinton's attempt to hide his sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Kenneth Starr's true political remit was to get Clinton by hook or by crook. Mueller's true mission is to take down Trump in any way he can.

Saturday, March 17, 2018

Larry Kudlow, a right-wing TV talking head who once had a $100,000 a
month cocaine habit, which he funded by a grossly-overpaid Wall Street
position, has been tapped by Donald "Jackass" Trump to be chief economic
advisor, replacing Gary Cohn, who came from Goldman Sachs and left in a
snit over Trump's imposition of import tariffs on steel and aluminum.
Kudlow is known for making wrng predictions- a perfect fit for the
fantasist regime of Trump.

Cohn and Kudlow both live
charmed lives as made members of the capitalist nomenklatura. No long
prison terms for consuming large amounts of cocaine for their ilk. No
career ruination either. Kudlow still makes big bucks making bad
predictions on television. Cohn will return to Goldman Sachs, which has
salted the top level of the Federal government with its operatives going
back several presidents.

Thursday, March 08, 2018

Trump announced stiff tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Aside from the fact that this is a terrible idea economically (but sounds good to the ignorant rubes who voted for him) it turns out that one of Trump's intentions is to use it to twist the arms of Canada and Mexico to stop being "so unfair" to the U.S. and knuckle under to a renegotiation of NAFTA on terms onerous to them. Trump announced his extortion demand via tweet and speaking to reporters.

“NAFTA, which is under renegotiation right now, has been a bad deal for U.S.A. Massive relocation of companies & jobs,” Trump proclaimed in a tweet March 5th. “Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum will only come off if new & fair NAFTA agreement is signed.”

Later, Trump, told reporters that he had spoken by phone with U.S. negotiators at the NAFTA "renegotiation" talks in Mexico City with Canada and Mexico. “But if they are not going to make a NAFTA deal, we’re just going to leave it this way,” Trump said at a news conference in Washington, holding the tariffs over the heads of those two nations as a club to bludgeon them into submission.

[NAFTA stands for North American Free Trade Agreement. "Free trade" is euphemism for big corporate economic hegemony. The horrible president Bill Clinton created NAFTA with Canada and Mexico, two weak nations to the north and south of the U.S. that are under heavy U.S. domination.]

Saturday, February 24, 2018

Their solution? Give the teachers guns! Pistol-packin' Mamas will solve the problem!

The Sheriff's deputy assigned to "protect" the school, where he'd been posted for eight years, and was deemed a "Deputy of the Year," he didn't want to risk his skin by going inside. And three of his colleagues hid outside behind their car doors with their guns drawn.

If fucking COPS cower in fear outside while a single malcontent murders people, how is arming teachers going to produce a better result?

So useless sheriff's deputies let a gunman kill 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Trump and the NRA think armed teachers can do a better job.

I guess if the teacher is cornered, and has a gun, at least there's a chance of the gunman being shot. We sure can't count on police. That's been shown repeatedly.

It was shown in a previous Florida massacre, at a gay nightclub, when cops hung back for hours.

It happened at the high school in Columbine, Colorado, when the cops played it safe.

You see, the vast majority of cops are no "heroes." They fall into two categories: time fillers who are in it for the money and the fat pension and medical insurance benefits denied to other workers (and increasingly denied to teachers), and bullies, thugs and sadists who are on a power trip. (Many of these are also racists.)

Teachers have been under a multi-year attack by the rulers in this country. There is an ongoing, systematic attempt to destroy their unions, obviously to attack their standard of living. This happened in Wisconsin under the Koch Brothers' puppet Governor Scott Walker, and other places. At this very moment teachers in West Virginia are striking over their abysmal pay (48th in the nation) and being gouged on their health insurance. The "charter schools" movement is a plot by billionaire hedge fund managers and their political stooges (like Arne Duncan and Barack Obama) and profiteers to deunionize teachers.

Teachers are scapegoated for the social pathologies of racism and institutional poverty. It takes a lot of GALL for the same political bosses who have been waging war on teachers to now demand that they function as armed bodyguards for their pupils and lay their lives on the line- something the Sheriff's Deputies in Broward County just conspicuously refused to do, as have police in numerous other instances.

Oh, and the "world's premiere law enforcement agency," the one the Democrats and the establishment propaganda system puts on a pedestal and insists everyone must genuflect before, and none dare speak an unkind word about- yes, that one, the secret police agency FBI. Their "tip line" blew off a specific warning that the killer, an emotionally disturbed 19-year-old, was dangerous and might ATTACK A SCHOOL. The FBI call center didn't bother passing that tip along. Because it wasn't about Islamic terrorism or some leftists making trouble for the system.

Okay, some police act like actual police. They are a minority.

But while teachers' wages and benefits are under relentless assault, cops are sitting pretty. The attack on public sector unions in Wisconsin exempted the police and fire unions. And cops generally are a labor aristocracy. In New York City, they make mid to high-five figure salaries, get a sweetheart deal on health insurance, and only have to work 20 years to get a full pension and lifetime health insurance. If they work fewer years, they still get partial benefits. And their pension is based on the last year of salary, so traditionally they pile on overtime to "earn" a six-figure salary that last year.

Some jurisdictions are even more lucrative for the enforcers of social order and protectors of the power structure, some less.

Florida, that day, taking a bullet to shield his students.

What should be the lesson for would-be revolutionaries in this? It is that cops won't risk their lives. If there is ever a serious armed uprising in the U.S., expect the cops to mostly run away. These incidents reveal a weakness under the surface of the repressive U.S. apparatus. (Of course there are that minority of killers and fanatics and SWAT team thugs, who have been armed with fully automatic weapons and sniper rifles and even silencers by the Obama regime.)

In the past, riots by unarmed blacks were violently suppressed by white police, sheriffs, National Guardsmen, and even U.S. Army units. The situation could be very different in the future, with these repressive formations frequently racially "integrated" now, and a general sense of cynicism among those who serve a system that is corrupt. As at the end of the Soviet Union, when no one believed the propaganda slogans anymore, naive belief in the empty bellowing about "freedom and democracy" is on the wane.

Of course any revolution is as likely to be from the hard right as from the left. The right has guns, after all, and is treated with kid gloves by the system. The left is unarmed and subject to vicious repression, as what happened to the oil pipeline protesters at Standing Rock, in North Dakota, illustrated, and the ongoing persecution of Trump inauguration protesters by the Federal government in Washington, D.C.

Friday, January 19, 2018

A common political epithet in the United States is "flip-flopper."
This is considered a devastating characteristic, denoting indecisiveness
and weakness. (And of course "weak" and "indecisive" leaders are
assumed a priori to be BAD leaders.)

So here's a
trick Trump's Establishment enemies have missed: tagging Trump with the
"flip-flopper" label. He's certainly provided loads of soundbites they
could use to devastating effect to "brand" him that way.

Just on the issue of DACA, how many times has Trump seemed to change his mind by saying different and contradictory things? [1]

But instead of pasting a Trump-style sobriquet to Trump's forehead, like "Flip-Flop Donald," the bourgeois yakkers of the Establishment media persist in trying to figure out what
Trump "really means" or "really wants" or what his "actual position
is." And the bourgeois politicians of the Democratic Party keep trying
to "negotiate" with Trump and get him to "clarify his position."

What fools. Perfect foils for the inveterate con man Trump. A standard m.o. (modus operandi)
of con men is confusing their marks, keeping them psychologically
off-balance, the better to manipulate them, to buffalo them into the
traps the con man sets.

Trump doesn't have positions.
He's a fast-talking but very predictable con man who uses verbiage as a
weapon, pure and simple. What he "wants" at any given moment is what he
senses will produce an advantage for himself. If tomorrow the racists
and xenophobes and fanatical nationalists of America lost interest in
"the wall," so would Trump. His "positions" change from day to day, or
even from sentence to sentence because he is winging it. He's a creature
of almost pure instinct. So trying to figure out his calculations is a
fool's errand because he does very little calculating.

Why
would a person who calculates have the assistant Attorney General take
credit for firing the FBI Director, have the story put out that it was
because Comey was unfair to Hillary Clinton (!) and then go bragging to
the Russian Foreign Minister and the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. how
he fired Comey to get the "Russian meddling" investigation off his back,
AND tell a TV interviewer the same? For that matter, why would a guy
whom the Democratic Party and much of the Establishment media was
branding a Russian stooge or colluder or puppet for months, even MEET
with Russian officials if he was doing any kind of logical thinking that can be called "calculating"?

Furthermore, there are plenty of other examples of Trump's irrationality.

Trump
is very easy to figure out. He is a narcissist, an egomaniac, a con
man, a rip-off artist, a braggart, and a real estate hustler.

And lest the media make us forget, a racist.

Trump reporting to his Russian handlers (as some would have it)

Foreign Minister Lavrov, Ambassador to the U.S. Kislyak.

1]
DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is the program that
Trump's predecessor, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama created by
executive order in the last year of his eight year reign as part of his
"legacy building" to be able to pose for the bourgeois version of
history as a progressive. Under the program, "illegal" immigrants who
were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents, who have "clean"
records, are temporarily exempt from deportation ("deferred action," get
it? meaning they are still subject to deportation at a later date) and
must either be enrolled in school or have a job. They are forced to pay a
steep $495.00 registration fee every two years. They also had to expose
their location: residence, phone, email, thus making later round-up
easy. 780,000 young people are enrolled int he program.

I
fulminated against this program at the time Obama announced it, because
I foresaw how the information the DACA-ites would be required to give
up was the equivalent of Jews registering with the Nazi "authorities"
and sewing Stars of David to their clothing. (And for a small percentage
of deportees, death is indeed the fate they meet in their dangerous
"home" countries of Mexico, Central America, Haiti, Colombia, and so
on.)

DACA-ites are referred to as "the Dreamers," a
reference to "the American Dream." You see, America is, in U.S.
propaganda, this paradisical land which everyone in the world aspires to
live in.

But America only looks good to the
"Dreamers," with their "dream" (delusion, it is turning out) of being
accepted as "Americans," in comparison to the hellish, lethal lands of
their origins. Lands that are lethal in all cases in part or mostly
because of the malign power of the U.S.

To take the
most obvious examples, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are fascist
death squad states where violent criminal gangs are also allowed to run
rampant. This is because of a U.S. coup (Guatemala 1954), support for a
coup (Honduras by Obama and his Secretary fo State, Hillary Clinton, who
hadf the effrontery to boast of her crime in one of her
autohagiographies) and support for fascist death squad governments (El
Salvador).

Even in Mexico, the U.S. helps prop up corrupt regimes and validates a stolen presidential "election" every six years.

Then
the U.S. has the nerve to persecute people fleeing the results of U.S.
"foreign policy." And its border guards regularly murder people.

Saturday, January 13, 2018

Trump in the presence of seven members of Congress, while "negotiating" changes in (anti-)immigration laws, erupted that the U.S. doesn't need people from the "shithole" nations of El Salvador, Haiti, and the entire African continent. Instead he querulously demanded why the U.S. can't get more people from "countries like Norway."

In other words, no more swarthy people, more blond-haired, blue-eyed, "white" people, similar to himself. (Although he is orange-haired, he's of German ancestry.)

For some reason, there is a dispute over whether this naked display of racism was racist. (As if, given Trump's decades-long record of evidence of racism, there is any room for doubt at this point.)

Rich Lowry, the editor of the neo-fascist "intellectual" rag National Review, founded by racist William F. Buckley, Jr. an opponent of civil rights laws, opined on the radio program "Left, Right and Center" that Trump merely meant the U.S. should take in people with skills, and he was just being "grumpy" when he called two nations plus an entire continent of another 54 countries shitholes. Apparently darkies have no skilled, unlike the Superior White Race.

This was doubly odd in that National Review, and Lowry, have been anti-Trump all through his presidential campaign and through his time in office, up until now.And even though there is no doubt Trump said what he said, the fact that after a long delay, he issued an ambiguous kind-of denial, has led the media to use adjectives like "alleged" and "reported," creating doubt about whether he said it! Even the UK Government propaganda network the BBC is doing this.

Also instead of calling what he said "racist," the media is using the word "vulgar." (NPR for example, the U.S. government domestic radio propaganda network.)What does the man have to do to convince the media weasels that Trump is a racist? March in a Klan rally in Klan robes?

A brief review of Trump's decades of racism:

Ordered his building agents not to rent to blacks.

After the Federal government forced the Trumps (his Dad, a known Klansman, was involved in this) into a settlement agreement not to discriminate, he violated the agreement and kept on discriminating.Removed "non-white" casino employees from the floor of his casino.

Took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, five non-white teenagers framed up by the New York City Police and Manhattan District Attorney for raping and nearly killing a white female investment banker jogger.

Years later, after the actual culprit was definitively identified by DNA and the rapist's confession, Trump refused to accept it and fulminated against money paid by the city to settle a civil suit by the now adult men.

His entire presidential campaign, which included branding millions of Mexican immigrants as rapists, drug dealers, and only "some, I suppose, are good people."

His bigoted attempts to exclude virtually all Muslims from the U.S.

And much more.

What's even odder about the media's soft-peddling is that they seemingly want to be rid of Trump. Apparently they're reluctant to offend the millions of white racists in America.

Fortunately there was one Democrat in the room, Senator Dick Durbin. The Republicans have been tongue-tied. Tom Cotton actually claims amnesia, saying he "doesn't remember" hearing it. You can bet Trump's remark went off like a bomb in the room. Cotton is a loathsome Senator from Arkansas, a former Army officer, rabid reactionary, and militant imperialist. And a dishonest creep who hates whistleblowers.

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Bannon has been banished from the Land of Trump. Good King Donald is
said to be mightily vexed that Sir Stephen did blaspheme against the
Good Names of King Trump's Son, Donald the True, and on the husband of
the King's Daughter, Princess Ivanka, who is married to Jared the
Valiant, even uttering the vile vituperation that Prince Donald did
commit Treason against the Nation. By such base effrontery did Sir
Stephen author his own Fate and cause himself to be cast out from the
charmed circle of The Elect(ed).

The indiscreet Bannon was too
frank with a sneaky infiltrator of the Court, one Michael Wolff, known
to be an inveterate peddler of rumor and inaccuracies, who took
advantage of the King's good graces and, hidden behind a benign mask of faux friendship,
came with mal-intent. Wolff is gleefully profiting from his treachery,
peddling all over the Land with the help of sundry town criers a tome,
whose title cheekily appropriates a quote from the King Himself, Who in
defense of the Realm, righteously threatened a pipsqueak upstart Kingdom
on the far side of the globe with "Fire and Fury." The underhanded
Wolff has gone so far as to question the King's soundness of mind.

Our
Noble King did immediately put to good use the rapier-like wit for
which He is justly renowned, christening the fallen Bannon "Sloppy
Steve," a mirthful jape not even the cleverest adolescents of the Land
could best.

The Luckless Bannon, having fallen out of favor
with His Majesty, is being ostracized by Respectable Society. His patron
and benefactress, Rebekah of Mercer, has cut off the generous
emoluments with which She favored him. The Accursed Bannon is no longer
welcome even in his old haunt, the Breitbart Inn.

His
political nemesis, Lord McConnell of the Senate, is understood to be
experiencing a pleasurable feeling that in the lands of the Germanic
tribes is dubbed "schadenfreude," said to refer to satisfaction
occasioned by the misfortune of another.....

The King Points Out That He Is Sound Of Mind

Meanwhile, in the 21st Century...

Bannon's
high-speed plunge from a lofty, privileged peak of influence and power
into the gutter of public opprobrium has been as rapid as that of
Harvey "Come Up To My Hotel Room So I Can Show You My Script" Weinstein.
It turns out that Bannon's power was always wholly derivative, not
organic to himself. Outside of TrumpWorld, he is merely another extreme
reactionary crank, bigot, white supremacist, anti-Semite, sexist,
militaristic hypernationalist who likes to run his mouth. In other
words, a guy who is a dime a dozen.

Bannon
was encouraged in his delusions of political potency by the U.S. media,
which obsessively treated him as if he were powerful. They did this in
part due to his proximity to Trump, and in part because they took him at
his word that he really was the representative of millions of racist
reactionaries, his self-anointed role. There was much excited
speculation about whether candidates running in GOP (Gang Of Plunderers)
primary elections, which he endorsed, would unseat candidates of
Bannon's sworn enemies, the Republican "establishment," which he
publicly reviled.

I
haven't heard any retractions or admissions of error by the
establishment media for getting Bannon's true position so wrong, or for
promoting him, nor by the media of that U.S.-toady nation, "Great"
Britain, which aped the line of the American media.

Bannon's
very energetic ego met the immovable mountain that is reality, and the
ego wilted. All his life, Bannon has been a pushy, arrogant, abusive
bastard (and violent towards women- brave man!). He made a mint from his
ownership stake in the Seinfeld TV hit, and was paid the big bucks as
an "investment banker." His reactionary ideology no doubt opened many
doors for him, as the U.S. establishment is reactionary to its core,
notwithstanding the masks it wears to dupe the rest of us. But the
reality of power is that Trump is president, and Trump is a major
celebrity with millions of enthusiastic fans. Bannon is not. And Bannon
openly declared himself an enemy of the Republican Party, which is
squarely aligned behind Trump. When crunch time came, Bannon had no
friends or allies with any clout on his side. Indeed, his avowed aim to
"overthrow the establishment" made enemies of every Republican
politician, even "insurgents" who would rather nail their flag to
Trump's mast than to that of Bannon's rapidly sinking ship.

A Bummed-Out Bannon Mulls His Future

As
for Wolff, he's long been a man on the make. A habitue of New York City
media circles, during one period he kept trying to promote himself as a
would-be media mogul. (Bannon and Trump aren't the only people in this
saga with delusions.) He now boasts that his book will lead to Trump's
downfall. Of course it won't. It's just more anti-Trump noise in the
relentless anti-Trump campaign that most of the media, the Democratic
Party, and the secret police agencies of the Deep State have been waging
since Trump's election and with increased intensity after he was sworn
into office. (The FBI has taken the lead in the covert side of this
campaign to oust Trump or at a minimum tie him up and force him to carry
out policies to the liking of the power structure as a whole, such as
the new Cold War against Russia, but it is also no accident that top
former secret police apparatchiks like Obama's CIA chieftain John
Brennan, former NSA and CIA chieftain General Michael V. Hayden, and
Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, have all
publicly denounced Trump at various times.)

Wolff
praised Bannon as a great strategist and "a man who can see two steps
ahead." Maybe those are baby steps. Bannon couldn't see that badmouthing
Trump's son and son-in-law wasn't a brilliant political chess move? [1]

Wolff's
book contains numerous factual errors, errors readily apparent. Wolff's
publisher, like all major U.S. publishers, disavows any responsibility
for the accuracy of what they sell as non-fiction, even though they
commission the books, edit the books, print the books, publish the
books, market the books, and sell the books. Wolff's book taps into a
ravenous appetite for dirt on Trump. Since everyone involved is making
boatloads of money, all is forgiven. And since most of the media is
determined to Get Trump, they've pretended that Wolff's credibility
isn't an issue, despite all the obvious factual errors. His portrait of everyone in
Trump's orbit being horrified by him is surely nonsense. But Wolff
cleverly wrote his story to conform to the contours of the negative
image of Trump which has already been established. I largely agree that
the image is true, except that calling Trump "unstable" is ridiculous.
Trump's personality has been firmly fixed since adolescent. We have
decades of a public record of his behavior. He's a narcissist,
egomaniac, con man, rip-off artist, hustler, and inveterate liar. His
personality is extremely stable. His character as an amoral charlatan is
unchanging. He has robbed workers, contractors, banks, and "students"
of his sham "university." Oh, and he's a confirmed racist.

The
inexplicable thing about the Trump phenomenon is that this loathsome
character has admirers, indeed millions of them. Or rather, it's only
explicable if we grant that there are millions of dumb asses out there
who are ethically defective, as is their idol- not an unreasonable
assumption based on much evidence besides the popularity of Trump. This
is a truth leftists are unable to face, as "the people" is their idol.
But it is a fact that demagogues and despots, as well as
run-of-the-mill politicians, have long exploited, in many times and
places. It is a huge barrier to the evolution of a rational, humane, normal human civilization.

Janet Malcolm (named Jana Wienerova at birth) is a very privileged writer with a sinecure at TheNew Yorker magazine
(hence very privileged) who wrote a two-part article for that magazine
in March 1989, which she also peddled as a book, The Journalist and the Murderer.
It's basic message is conveniently conveyed in the first sentence:
"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice
what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." What
she meant, in part, was that journalists trick people into trusting
them, and then frequently betray that trust. Michael Wolff perhaps would
meet with her disapproval- except that The New Yorker is a main
cannon lobbing shells into TrumpWorld in the ongoing campaign to oust
him from office. So Malcolm perhaps is in line with The New Yorker consensus. That would make Wolff an ally.

Unfortunately,
Malcolm's piece was an extended attack on and denunciation of
journalist Joe McGinniss, for what she viewed as his reprehensible act
of gaining the trust of the Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald, and then
accurately portraying him as the murderer he is. MacDonald had murdered
his entire family, and claimed that LSD-crazed hippies had done the deed
(sparing MacDonald himself for some odd reason). This blood libel
against hippies by a trained killer was sickening. One of the main
attributes of hippies was pacifism and non-violence. (No, Charles Manson
wasn't a hippie, he was a psychopathic career criminal, and his cult
followers were just a criminal gang.) Malcolm finds McGinniss morally
despicable. MacDonald apparently not so much. There was great
controversy over the MacDonald case because reactionaries preferred to
believe the imaginary hippies did it.

Interestingly,
Malcolm is completely blind to her own moral hypocrisy. She did exactly
the thing she condemned McGinniss for. Her victim was a psychoanalyst
named Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. This project also started out as New
Yorker articles and became a book, In The Freud Archives. This
was also back in the 1980s. I remember the articles well even today.
They read as objective, descriptive accounts of Masson and doing at the
Freud Archives, then suddenly near the end became a savage attack on
Masson. I thought at the time, Gee, sure didn't see THAT hatchet coming!
It was so over-the-top, and apparently unprovoked. Masson sued Malcolm
for libel, but after a ten year legal battle, he lost, even though
Malcolm was unable to offer written or recorded evidence for various
"quotes" she put in Masson's mouth that made him sound like a sexual
swinger who wanted to turn the Archives into something like the New York
City sex swingers club Plato's Retreat. [2]

So
Malcolm actually is what she reviled in McGinniss, someone who gains a
subject's trust only to betray it. Well, journalism is a dirty business,
but a gal does what a gal's gotta do, I guess. The rest of us should
only care if the result is truthful and accurate. And that is why Russia
deserves a salute for providing us all with accurate information about
Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and the DNC in 2016, making the American
electorate better-informed voters. Thus the Russians strengthened American democracy!!